


Always.

by crqstalite



Series: Eye of the Storm [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Brione Petrakis, F/M, Pre ME3, ask from tumblr, post ME2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26738359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crqstalite/pseuds/crqstalite
Summary: She's putting it off. Leaving, as it was.Honestly, she doesn't know why. Her bags are all packed, her dress blues are pressed and folded on the cot next to her. Her datapad has been prepped to send all of her reports straight to Alliance Command. Yet she's left her comb in her duffel, hair decidedly unbrushed around her shoulders, still sitting in her fatigues and they're only an hour out from the Citadel. She could be in the crew quarters, going over any possible assignments they could give her. She could be trying to get another couple of winks in. Anything other than being here, and desperately hanging on to what felt like the last thing she had in the galaxy.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Series: Eye of the Storm [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1747411
Kudos: 2





	Always.

She's putting it off. Leaving, as it was.

Honestly, she doesn't know why. Her bags are all packed, her dress blues are pressed and folded on the cot next to her. Her datapad has been prepped to send all of her reports straight to Alliance Command. Yet she's left her comb in her duffel, hair decidedly unbrushed around her shoulders, still sitting in her fatigues and they're only an hour out from the Citadel. She could be in the crew quarters, going over any possible assignments they could give her. She could be trying to get another couple of winks in. Anything other than being here, and desperately hanging on to what felt like the last thing she had in the galaxy.

It would've been so much easier not to be here right now, but nothing in the last year had been easy. It's harder to force herself out, hell she's been sleeping in here for the last week or so.

The lights flicker just above her, the battery still stuttering in a way that frustrated Garrus to no end. Not that they had much need for it these days, but she'd offered to take a look at it. He'd been content to let her sit nearby. Talking about trivial things during the first few days after the suicide mission with some of her senses glossed over by pain meds, maybe more than a little wine in their systems. Then it waned into painful silence as they grew closer to the station, wine bottle empty and all sentiments aired. All the things she knows she can't say, all the things she wants to.

She rolls another bandage around her hand, pulling taut. It'd been her good hand too, a lucky shot taken by a Collector that had left her unable to snipe properly during the last leg of the base assault. Still bruised and trying it's hardest to bleed through. Mordin hadn't been there to do it properly, so it had been her, hearing gunshots against the barrier they'd set up, blood gushing from her hand with Garrus asking her if she was alright. Medi-gel spilling from her shaking hands, only being able to offer suppressing fire with her Carnifex before Shepard told them to retreat. Her wrist whined from the motion, and she barely catches a blue eye darting between her and the UI when she groans.

"Still bothering you?" His voice is softer than usual when she catches him in the act, hands stilling over the keyboard, "Chakwas should really take a look at that."

"She can once we're back in Alliance space," Brione haphazardly cuts off the end of it, tucking it under one of the other wraps. She tests a smile with the nearly healed scar on her lip, "Besides, you're the one who was apparently up and fighting with Shepard not even two days after you nearly died, Garrus."

Another beat of silence before he starts again, mandibles flaring as he sighs. Exasperated with her, maybe. He'd been bothering her about it for days now, usually asking how it was and if she needed anything, "We Turians are a bit hardier than our human counterparts," He gestures to the scarred side of his head, bandage recently removed. "Brione-"

"Don't." She lays the gauze down next to her, unable to meet his eyes. She doesn't want to think about the fact these are their last days together, the fact this could very well be the last time she hears him say her name. There wasn't much guaranteed after their non-human crewmembers stepped off the ship, nothing saying he had to stay with her, even over light years separating them, "I'll see Chakwas once, once everyone is gone. Shepard will have my head if I lose a hand before we get there anyway."

"You can't hide in here forever, Brione," Is all he says, giving her a concerned look but finishing his diagnostics on the console first, "No reason in putting it off."

This talk has been a week coming. He hesitates, unsure of himself while she tries to will the tears away, turning away from him. What was she, six? She could handle a suicide mission (which they'd all nearly died on), so why was saying goodbye, saying see you later, saying that she'd see him again soon so hard? She was a captain of the Alliance military, not a babbling schoolgirl with a crush.

Except, that's what it felt like, navigating a relationship with him. She'd downright giggled at something he'd told her.

Does he know just how much he means to her?

It wasn't as if extranet access would be blocked for her when she got back to Earth. By every law that Shepard had learned (and in turn exploited) surprisingly quickly, most of the human operatives aboard the SR-2 wouldn't be arrested under the same duress she would be. Brione could still send messages to Palaven, could still say hello every once and a while.

Hello wasn't the same as being able to sit in a comfortable silence with one at the console, the other completing her daily reports with her legs folded under her, hair tied up in a messy bun at the base of neck. Hello wasn't the same as finding leftovers from the dinner prepared earlier and pulling all-nighters just to spend some time together.

Brione wasn't sure when this had turned into more, when she had started to want more. When she couldn't think of a tomorrow without him. At first, she'd just entertained it as little more than a fling, if she was going to die at the end of the year, then she could cross a few things off her bucket list. And, he was a friend. They'd met a few years before the SR-1, a one off meeting during her shore leave. Then they'd been squadmates, fighting their way through waves and waves of Geth, two snipers snipping at each other for their aim. It boggled the mind that it'd been so quick after Alchera, that she started to discover little things about him when she had little else to do. The small visits about the battery that turned into hour long conversations once she'd rejoined the Normandy. One or the other venting about a minor problem or a large one they'd held onto for so long they'd made a joke of it.

He'd patiently listened when she recounted the dressing down she'd been given after Torfan and the therapy sessions she'd attended afterwards. That, she'd never told anyone about in detail. Hated reliving the day, but it slipped from her mouth so easily while she'd been sitting on the crates. Then she'd sipped on some sort of tea Shepard had picked up on the Citadel, listening to him about Sidonis, about his time on Omega in general. That by the time they were within range of the relay, she'd simply decided she didn't want to let go. That there wasn't anyone like him, that there was so much left that she still wanted. They'd spent the night on the cot he'd dragged in here sometime ago, and she'd never felt so alive.

Then they'd survived. And then there was a whole new life expanding before her, with the Reapers looming over them. But she'd lived, they'd lived, and now she wasn't sure what they were. It wasn't a fling anymore, but she didn't know where he fit into her life.

Whether he wanted to fit in her life. She's sure he could have just about anyone, and he hadn't seemed too upset, giving her the way out of asking whether she wanted something closer to home.

How did he become her home? It could've been anywhere else, on Earth, in London, on the Citadel. But instead, it was a certain Garrus Vakarian.

"This isn't -- it isn't the end, Brione, not if you don't want it to be," He holds a hand out to her, "If I know Shepard, and I'd assume I do, she'll get us back into the thick of it within a couple months. If that."

"That might be a little optimistic," She responds, toying with her hair for a moment before grasping his hand, pulling herself up off the cot to look at him properly. She gently holds a hand against the scarred side of his head, brushing the rough plates with her thumb, "I would've been rather stupid to think this would last forever, running into the sunset. I'm just glad we had what we did, Garrus."

He leans into her touch, his other arm snaking around her waist. Why did it have to be him that she'd become attached to? The first person that'd make her feel more like a living being than a cold blooded killer that remained a few seconds from death every time she stepped off the ship?

Why is he all she can think about these days?

"I," He pauses again, "I'll always just be a comm away. If that's what you want, of course."

"Always, hm?" She asks, "Don't know how timezones work from Earth to Palaven, but if you haven't noticed, I'm not much of sleeping person. You could lose a lot of it, talking to me. But you've never minded it before now, I guess."

"It'd be better than nothing." He responds, when she drops her hand and instead pulls him closer to her. Maybe it's not the most comfortable with him in armor, and her still regularly needing their dwindling supply of pain meds, but she just wants to feel something, anything. She can't go back to the way things were, alone, and cold in an alliance apartment with nothing but her next meal going for her.

"I don't want to leave you, Garrus," She admits, her voice cracking. Brione won't cry, she wills herself not to, even as the dam strains against them, "You, damn you, you're...everything."

"You're...lovely yourself, Brione. Not like I'm itching to leave either, not when everything's already going right for once," He responds, the words thrumming through what she thinks are Turian subvocals. If Turians even can whisper, she's pretty sure he is while gently running his hands through her hair, then trailing down her back, "But I'm not sure I look all that good in...what was it Shepard called it? 'Jumpsuit orange'? Not sure how friendly the Alliance would be to me either."

"Probably not very," She tries to laugh, tries to force anything out at all, but instead all she gets is a choking sound that she could compare to a varren. A rogue tear slips out anyway, and all she hopes for is that Garrus can't see it. Why is she falling apart? Why now? She has a million and three battles under her belt, and this is what shatters her? Not a shotgun, not a scion, but this.

She'd said goodbye to so many people before. To her various adoptive parents over the years, her old COs, even Alenko more recently. None of them destroyed her like this was.

Relationships. They're impossible. They're weaknesses and vulnerabilities that your enemies are just waiting to take advantage of. Even more if your's is a cross-species liaison, one that shouldn't have become everything that it was now.

Brione doesn't want to live without him.

She can't bring herself to say it out loud, so she doesn't. He holds her a little while longer, they don't say anything but reassuring the other all would be well. Or at least they try, and it dissolves until silence when there isn't anything to say but repeat themselves ten times over. They sit for a while after that, time whittling down all the while. Her hands fit a bit oddly in his, but she can't find herself wanting to let go all the while.

Shepard's voice comes over the comm with a timer on their arrival, and she has to pick up her things, fastening the last button on her jacket and throwing her duffel bag over her shoulder. Garrus offers her one last lingering forehead touch when they reach the airlock, and she kisses him softly, knowing if she stays any longer, she won't be able to leave.

But she does. She has to be able to.

She sees him off, the glint of his blue armor the last thing she sees. She thinks she's the perfect picture of someone who was trying (and inwardly failing) to stay afloat with a forced grin and a wave as he walks off. Brione doesn't care, as much as the crew teases her about calibrations in more than one capacity. A few get a smile out of her, but she feels numb the rest of the way to Earth.

Cold. It settles in like an all too familiar blanket. The chill of not really seeing the faces of the people around her, nor acknowledging what they had to say.

She slips back into her normal routines, after the hearing. Doesn't even realize it at first, but without her usual visits to someone who wasn't dolled up in Alliance blue, there's nothing to it. She's shuttled back to the Citadel after a month, sent to work with Udina. A liaison to Alliance and from the Council, is effectively her job description. It's like clockwork, sleep, work, find something to eat if she was feeling physically up to it, work until she couldn't, then reluctantly sleep again. Fix up her sniper rifle on the weekends, take it to a range to keep herself sharp.

There's no Turian on her six though. No one there to bother her that her shot is off just a few inches so that clips the outside of the target.

She sees his face in every single one that walks by until they all blur together. She hears his voice in every C-SEC officer that speaks to Udina, to her.

It isn't until two months later that she receives a mail on her comm. Right in the middle of another one of Udina's tirades about the lack of Council support and funding, she opens it like any other email she'd received before. Calculating, tired, she reads over the sender, the subject line and is halfway through scrolling through it when the glaze over her eyes recedes and she realizes just who it is. Her breath catches in her throat, taking her leave for the afternoon.

She finally gets a call after work that day. And just as suspected, it keeps her up all night. There's so much to say, so much that she hadn't known. Her new job, his new task force. And yet, he still seems so indescribably happy to see her. That her eyes are barely being held open to focus on him, but that he's here, as much as he can be.

"Sure you don't want to take back that offer of always being on the other end of the comm? Now that we've done it, I might get a taste for it," She says, yawning as she absentmindedly rubs an eye. Udina will give her shit for being there late in the morning (in a couple hours really), but she doesn't care.

"As long as you want me to be," He nods, "Well, hopefully you don't start calling me at the oddest hours of the night or in the middle of meetings, but always, yes."

"Hm. I'll file it under consideration," She perches her head on her palm, taking in every detail the vid would let her, "Always?"

"Always. Now get some sleep, Brione," His voice softens, mandibles flaring into a smile as her vision blurs, "Good night."

Five months after that, communication to Palaven goes dark. The Reapers attack, and she watches wide-eyed as they touch down in Earth.

And her always becomes an empty promise with every refugee she watches come in during the days afterwards.

Garrus is not among them.


End file.
